Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

by Dee Brown

  they wished to do so. He went with the party, about thirty chiefs

  and warriors, to a hill not far from the fort. Eight chiefs and warriors volunteered to ride down to the fort, one of them carrying a large white cloth on a lance. As they neared the fort, some

  of Bear Coat's mercenary Crows came charging out.

  Ignoring

  the truce flag, the Crows fired point-blank into the Sioux.

  Only

  three of the eight escaped alive. Some of the Sioux watching from the hill wanted to ride out and seek revenge on the Crows,

  but Crazy Horse insisted that they hurry back to camp. They would have to pack up and run again. Now that Bear Coat knew

  there were Sioux nearby, he would come searching through the

  snow for them.

  Bear Coat caught up with them on the morning of January g

  (1877) at Battle Butte, and sent his soldiers charging through

  foot-deep snow. Crazy Horse had but little ammunition left to

  defend his people, but he had some good warrior chiefs who

  knew enough tricks to mislead and punish the soldiers while the

  main body of Indians escaped through the Wolf Mountains toward the Bighorns. Working in concert, Little Big Man, Two Moon, and Hump decoyed the troops into a canyon. For four

  hours they kept the soldiers-who were encumbered with bulky

  winter uniforms-stumbling and falling over ice-covered criffs.

  Snow began sifting down during the engagement, and by early

  afternoon ablizzard was raging. This was enough for Bear Coat.

  He took his men back to the warmth of Fort Keogh.

  Through the soeen of sleety snow, Crazy Horse and his people made their way to the familiar country of the Little Powder.

  They were camped there in February, living off what game they

  could find, when runners brought news that Spotted Tail and a

  party of Brul6s were coming from the south. Some of the Indians

  in the camp thought that perhaps Spotted Tail at last had tired of

  being told what to do on his reservation and was running away

  from the soldiers, but Crazy Horse knew better.

  During the cold moons, Three Stars Crook had taken his men

  out of the snow into Fort Fetterman. While he was waiting for

  spring, he paid a visit to Spotted Tail and promised him that the

  reservation Sioux would not have to move to the Missouri River

  if the Brul6 chief would go as a peace emissary to Crazy Horse

  and persuade him to surrender. That was the purpose of Spotted

  Tail's visit to Crazy Horse's camp.

  Just before Spotted TaiI arrived, Crazy Horse told his father that he was going away. He asked his father to shake hands with

  Spotted Tail and tell him the Oglalas would come in as soon as

  the weather made it possible for women and children to travel.

  Then he went off to the Bighorns alone. Crazy Horse had not

  made up his mind yet whether he would surrender; perhaps he

  would let his people go while he stayed in the Powder River country alone-like an old buffalo bull cast out of the herd.

  When Spotted Tail arrived, he guessed that Crazy Horse was avoiding him. He sent messengers out to find the Oglala leader,

  but Crazy Horse had vanished in the deep snows. Before Spotted

  Tail returned to Nebraska, however, he convinced Big Foot that

  he should surrender his Minneconjous, and he received promises

  from Touch-the-Clouds and three other chiefs that they would

  bring their people to the agency early in the spring.

  On April 14 Touch-the-Clouds, with a large number of Minneconjous and Sans Arcs from Crazy Horse's viilage, arrived at the

  Spotted Tail agency and surrendered. A few days before this happened, Three Stars Crook had sent Red Cloud out to find

  Crazy Horse and promise him that if hd surrendered he could

  have a reservation in the Powder River country. On April 27

  Red Cloud met Crazy Horse and told him of Three Stars's promise. Crazy Horse's nine hundred Ogialas were starving, the warriors had no ammunition, and their horses were thin and bony.

  The promise of a reservation in the Powder River country was all

  PHOTO PAGE 309

  Bura M!1 Heaft atWounded Knee

  that Crazy Horse needed to bring him in to Fort Robinson to surrender.

  The last of the Sioux war chiefs now became a reservation Indian, disarmed, dismounted, with no authority over his people, a prisoner of the Army, which had never defeated him in

  battle. Yet he was still a hero to the young men, and their adulation caused jealousies to arise among the older agency

  chiefs. Crazy Horse remained aloof, he and his followers living

  only for the day when Three Stars would make good his promise

  of a reservation for them in the Powder River country.

  Late in the sumrner, Crazy Horse heard that Three Stars wanted him to go to Washington for a council with the Great

  Father. Crazy Horse refused to go. He could see no point in talking about the promised reservation. He had seen what happened to chiefs who went to the Great Father's house in Washington; they came back fat from the white man's way of living

  and with all the hardness gone out of them. He could see the

  changes in Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, and they knew he saw

  and they did not like him for it.

  In August news came that the Nez Perc6s, who lived beyond

  the Shining,Mountains, were at war with the Bluecoats. At the

  agencies, solilier chiefs began enlisting warriors to do their scouting for them against the Nez Perc6s. Crazy Horse told the young

  men not to go against those other Indians far away, but some

  would not listen, and allowed themselves to be bought by the

  soldiers. On August 31, the day these former Sioux warriors put on their Bluecoat uniforms to march away, Crazy Horse was so sick with disgust that he said he was going to take his

  people and go back north to the Powder River country.

  When Three Stars heard of this from his spies, he ordered eight companies of pony soldiers to march to Crazy Horse's camp

  outside Fort Robinson and arrest him. Before the soldiers arrived, however, Crazy Horse's friends rvarned him they were coming. Not knowing what the soidiers' purpose was, Crazy Horse told his people to scatter, and then he set out alone to

  Spotted Tail agency to seek refuge with his old friend Touch-the-Clouds.

  The soldiers found him there, placed him under arrest, and informed him they were taking him back to Fort Robinson to

  PHOTO PAGE 311

  BurE My Heart at Wounded Knee

  see Three Stars. Upon arrival at the f.ort, Crazy Horse was told

  that it was too late to talk with Three Stars that day. He was turned over to Captain James Kennington and one of the agency

  policemen. Crazy Horse stared hard at the agency policeman.

  He was Little Big Man, who not so long ago had defied the commissioners who came to steal Paha Sapa, the same Little

  Big Man who had threatened to kill the first chief who spoke

  for selling the Black Hills, the brave Little Big Man who had last fought beside Crazy Horse on the iey slopes of the Wolf Mountains against Bear Coat Miles. Now the white men had

  bought Little Big Man and made him into an agency policeman.

  As Crazy Horse walked between them, letting the soldier chief and Little Big Man lead him to wherever they were taking

  him, he must have tried to dream himself into the real world,

  to escape the darkness of the shadow world in which all was

  madness. They walked past a soldier with a bayoneted rifle on

  his shoulder, and then they were standing in the doorway of a
<
br />   building. The windows were barred with iron, and he could see

  men behind the bars with chains on their legs. It was a trap for

  an animal, and Crazy Horse lunged away like a trapped animal,

  with Little Big Man holding on to his arm. The scuffiing went

  on for only a few seconds. Someone shouted a command, and

  then the soldier guard, Private William Gentles, thrust his bayonet deep into Crazy Horse's abdomen.

  Crazy Horse died that night, September 5, 1877, at the age of thirty-five. At dawn the next day the soldiers presented the

  dead chief to his father and mother. They put the body of Crazy

  Horse into a wooden box, fastened it to a pony-drawn travois.

  and carried it to Spotted Tail agency, where they mounted it on a scaffold. All through the Drying Grass Moon, mourners watched beside the burial place. And then in the Moon of tr'alling

  Leaves came the heartbreaking news: the reservation Sioux must

  leave Nebraska and go to a new reservation on the Missouri River.

  Through the crisp dry autumn ol 1877, long lines of exiled Indians driven by soldiers marched northeastward toward the

  barren land. Along the way, several bands slipped away from

  the column and turned northwestward, determined to escape to

  Canada and join Sitting Bull. With them went the father and 313

  mother of Crazy Horse, carrying the heart and bones of their

  son. At a place known only to them they buried Crazy Horse

  somewhere near Chankpe Opi Wakpala, the creek called Wounded

  Knee.

  SONG OF SITTING BULL

  I-ki-6i-ze

  wa-og kog he wa

  na he-na-laye-lo

  I

  he i-yo-ti-ye ki-yawa-o4

  Courtesu ol the Bureau ol American Ethnologv Collectiott A rvarrior

  I have been.

  Now

  it is all over.

  A hard tirne

  I have.

  ,a--a-. -a- .a- -a-

  ++ + +.E

  PHOTO PAGE 313

  Fourteen

  Cheyenne Exodus

  1878-January 10, resolution introduced in U.S. Senate that women be given a hearing on suffrage. June 4, Britain takes Cyprus from Turkey. July 12, yellow-fever epidemic begins in New Orleans; 4,500 die. October 18, Edison succeeds in subdividing electric current, adapting it for household use; gas stocks fall on New York Exchange. December, in St.

  Petersburg, Russia, university students battle police and Cossacks. In Austria, Ferdinand Mannlicher invents magazine repeating rifle. David Hughes invents the microphone. New York Symphony Society founded. Gilbert and Sullivan present H.M.S. Pinafore.

  We have been south and suffered a great deal down there.

  Many have died of diseases which we have no name f or.

  Our hearts looked and longed for this country where we were born. There are only a few of us left, and we only wanted a little ground, where we could live. We left our lodges standing, and ran away in the night. The troops followed us. I rode out and told the troops we did not want to fight; we only wanted to go north, and if they would let us alone we would kill no one. The only reply we got was a volley. After that we had to fight our way, but we killed none who did not fire at us first. My brother, Dull Knife, took one-half the band and surrendered near fort Robinson. . . They gave up their guns, and then the whites killed them all.

  -Ohcu Mgache (Little Wolf) of the Northern Cheyennes All we ask is to be allowed to live, and live in peace. . . . We bowed to the will of the Great Father and went south. There we found, a Cheyenne cannot live. So we came home.

  Better it was, we thought, to die fighting than to perish of sickness. . You may kill me here; but you cannot make me go back. We will not go. The only way to get us there is to come in here with clubs and knock, us on the head, and drag us out and, take us down there dead.

  -Tahmelapash (Dull Knife) of the Northern Cheyennes I regard the Cheyenne tribe of Indians, after an acquaintance with quite a number o! bands, as the finest body of that race which I have ever met.

  -Three Fingers (Colonel Ronald S. McKenzie) In tho Moon of Greening Grass, 1877, when Crazy Horse brought his Oglala Sioux to surrender at Fort Robinson, various bands of Cheyennes who had joined him during the winter also gave up their horses and arms, placing themselves upon the mercy of the soldiers. Among the Cheyenne chiefs were Little Wolf, Dull Knife, Standing Elk, and Wild Hog. Together their people numbered about one thousand. Two Moon and 350 Cheyennes, who had been separated from the others after the Little Bighorn fight, went down the Tongue River to fort Keogh and surrendered to Bear Coat Miles.

  The Cheyennes who came to Fort Robinson expected to live on the reservation with the Sioux in accordance with the treaty of 1868, which Little Wolf and Dull Knife had signed.

  Agents from the Indian Bureau informed them, however, that the treaty committed them to live either on the Sioux reservation or on a reservation set apart for the Southern Cheyennes. The agents recommended that the Northern Cheyennes be transferred to Indian Territory to live with their kinsmen, the Southern Cheyennes.

  "Our people did not like this talk," Wooden Leg said. "All of us wanted to stay in this country near the Black Hills. But we had one big chief, Standing Elk, who kept saying it would be better if we should go there. I think there were not as many as ten Cheyennes in our whole tribe who agreed with him. There was a feeling that he was talking this way only to make himself a big Indian among the white people."

  While the government authorities were deciding what to do with the Northern Cheyennes, the Bluecoat chiefs at Fort Robinson recruited some of the warriors to serve as scouts to help find scattered bands which were still out and were unwilling to accept the inevitability of surrender.

  William P. Clark, a cavalry lieutenant, persuaded Little Wolf and a few of his warriors to work with him. Clark wore a white hat while in the field, and that was the name the Cheyennes gave him-White Hat. They soon discovered that White Hat genuinely liked Indians, was interested in their way of life, their culture, language, religion, and customs.

  (Clark later published a scholarly treatise on the Indian sign language.)

  Little Wolf could have stayed on at Fort Robinson with White Hat, but when orders came from Washington for the Cheyennes to be marched overland to Indian Territory, he decided to go with his people. Before leaving, the apprehensive Cheyenne chiefs asked for a final council with Three Stars Crook. The general tried to reassure them, telling them to go down and have a look at the Indian Territory; if they did not like it they could come back north.

  (At least that was the way the interpreters translated Crook's words.)

  The Cheyennes wanted White Hat to go south with them, but the Army assigned the escort duty to Lieutenant Henry W. Lawton. "He was a good man," Wooden Leg said, always kind to the Indians." They called Lawton the Tall White Man, and were pleased when he let the old and sick people ride in the soldier wagons during the day and gave them Army tents to sleep in at night. The Tall White Man also saw that everyone received enough bread and meat and coffee and sugar.

  On the way south they followed familiar hunting trails, keeping away from towns, but they could see that the Plains were changing, filling up with railroads and fences and buildings everywhere. They sighted a few small herds of buffalo and antelope, and the Tall White Man issued rifles to thirty warriors chosen by the chiefs so they could go out and hunt.

  There were 972 Cheyennes who started from Fort Robinson in the Moon when the Ponies Shed. After traveling for almost a hundred sleeps, 937 of them reached Fort Reno on the Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation, August 5,1877. A few old people had died along the way; a few young men had slipped away to turn back north.

  Three Fingers Mackenzie was at Fort Reno to meet them. He took away their horses and what few weapons they had, but this time he did not shoot their horses, promising that their agent would return them
after they had settled down to farming on their new land. Then he transferred the Cheyennes to the care of the agent, John D. Miles.

  After a day or so the Southern Cheyennes invited their northern relatives to a customary tribal feast for newcomers, and it was there that Little Wolf and Dull Knife first discovered that something was wrong. The feast consisted of little more than a pot of watery soup; this was all that the southerners had to offer. There was not enough to eat in this empty land-no wild game, no clear water to drink, and the agent did not have enough rations to feed them all. To make matters worse, the summer heat was unbearable, and the air was filled with mosquitoes and flying dust.

  Little Wolf went to the agent and told him- they had come only to take a look at the reservation. Now, because they did not like it, they were ready to go back north as Three Stars Crook had promised they could do. The agent replied that only the Great Father in Washington could decide when or whether the Northern Cheyennes could go back to the Black Hills country. He promised to get more food; a beef herd was being driven up from Texas for them.

  The Texas Longhorns were scrawny, and their meat was as tough as their hides, but at least the Northern Cheyennes could now make soup as their relatives did. In late summer, the northerners began to fall sick with shaking chills, hot fevers, and an aching of bones. The sufferers wasted away in their misery. "Our people died, died, died, kept following one another out of this world."

  Little Wolf and Dull Knife complained to the agent and the soldier chief at Fort Reno until the Army at last sent Lieutenant Lawton, the Tall White Man, to make an inspection of the Northern Cheyenne camp. "They are not getting supplies enough to prevent starvation," Lawton reported. "Many of their women and children are sick for want of food. A few articles I saw given them they would not use themselves, but said they would take them to their children, who were crying for food. . . The beef I saw given them was of very poor quality, and would not have been considered merchantable for any use."